Posts Tagged ‘William Byrd’
“It’s not those who write the laws that have the greatest impact on society. It’s those who write the songs”*…
Broadside ballads were single-sheet songs that emerged with the spread of printing and sold for a penny a piece; the most popular of them were the 16th and 17th century equivalent of the Hit Parade. Christopher Marsh and Angela McShane have put together an extraordinary rich collection…
We here identify and present a body of the biggest hits from seventeenth-century England…
This website concentrates on over 100 resoundingly successful examples that you can investigate through recordings, images and a wealth of other materials. Whether you are interested in music, art, love, gender, tragedy, politics, family life, crime, history, humour or death, you will find something to engage you here…
For example, the ballad pictured above:
The Lamentable and Tragicall History of Titus Andronicus seems certain to have been written in c. 1594 as a spin-off from Shakespeare’s play about the fictional general whose final months in late-imperial Rome were even more bloody than the decades of military service that went before. Plays for the stage and songs for the street cross-fertilised throughout the early-modern period, and several of our hit songs reveal the relationship (see, for example, The Lamentation of Master Pages wife and An Excellent Ballad of George Barnwel).
The ballad, like the play, was highly successful. Of the two forms, it was perhaps the ballad that maintained its popularity more consistently after Titus’ first phase of marketability in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. There were numerous editions of the ballad in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More occasionally, it was also included in printed song-collections such as Richard Johnson’s Golden garland of princely pleasures (1620).
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To the tune of ‘Fortune my Foe’ (standard name)
‘Fortune my foe’ was so well known that notation appears in dozens of sources, both printed and manuscript. There are instrumental settings for lute, virginals, cittern and lyra viol, and several of the period’s most celebrated composers – John Dowland and William Byrd, for example – applied their talents to the tune. This was a remarkably solid melody, and renditions are striking in their consistency over time and space…
[Here it here]
99 other Tops of the Pops in the 17th century: “100 Ballads” @100ballads.
* Blaise Pascal
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As we belt it out, we might recall that on this date in 1994, a different ballad was #1 on the pop charts: Celine Dion singing “The Power of Love”– a cover of its author Jennifer Rush‘s version, which had itself reached the top of the chart nine years earlier.
“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it”*…
In the early 1950s, James Baldwin moved to a Swiss village in the Alps with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter under his arm. It was there that he finished his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which he largely attributes to Smith’s bluesy intonations: “It was Bessie Smith, through her tone and her cadence, who helped me to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken…and to remember the things I had heard and seen and felt. I had buried them very deep,” Baldwin wrote in an essay.
For the eminent American novelist and essayist, music was generative, unearthing inspiration that may otherwise remain concealed. Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi, a curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, hopes to rouse a new generation of writers with “Chez Baldwin,” a 478-track, 32-hour-long Spotify playlist based on Baldwin’s vinyl record collection.
“The playlist is a balm of sorts when one is writing,” Onyewuenyi told Hyperallergic. “Baldwin referred to his office as a ‘torture chamber.’ We’ve all encountered those moments of writers’ block, where the process of putting pen to paper feels like bloodletting. That process of torture for Baldwin was negotiated with these records.”…
“Listening to the Joy in James Baldwin’s Record Collection“: “Chez Baldwin,” a 32-hour-long Spotify playlist based on Baldwin’s vinyl record collection.
* “All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.” – James Baldwin
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As we listen, we might recall that it was on this date in 1575 that Queen Elizabeth granted choral composer Thomas Tallis and his student William Byrd a 21-year monopoly for polyphonic music and a patent to print and publish “set songe or songes in parts,” one of the first arrangements of its kind in England. Tallis had exclusive rights to print any music in any language, and he and Byrd had sole use of the paper used in printing music.
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